1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to a SIM card socket. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to a SIM card socket into which SIM cards having different sizes can be inserted and a terminal device including the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Portable terminals are being used by many users due to their communication functions and sufficiently small sizes which enable users to carry the portable terminals. In recent years, the portable terminal market has dramatically grown as the sizes of touch screens increase and hardware and software that can provide various content supports the portable terminals.
Portable terminals of the related art employ SIM cards to support the confidentiality of terminal users in the process of supporting communication functions. Accordingly, users can optionally use various terminal devices by using SIM cards in which their own information is recorded. Since unique information for service providers is recorded in the SIM cards, users must apply for subscriptions to the service providers to use communication services provided by the service providers and to receive SIM cards issued by the service providers. To use a desired communication service, a user may insert (and later remove) a SIM card into one terminal device. There may also be a need for multiple users to use a single terminal device to use the communication services in which the users are enrolled—thus needing to insert (and later remove) different SIM cards into the single terminal device. However, as sizes and standards of SIM cards have changed recently, there may occur a difficulty in replacement and insertion of SIM cards. Because micro SIM cards are among the first SIM cards to be conventionally used, most sockets supporting the insertion of SIM cards into terminal devices have been designed to correspond to the size of the micro SIM cards. However, due to recent developments in hardware technology, nano SIM cards having a size different from the size of the micro SIM cards have been manufactured and circulated for various uses.
Accordingly, terminal devices also realize sockets into which nano SIM cards may be inserted. As a result, since the micro SIM cards and the nano SIM cards have different sizes, they cannot use sockets of the same size. Although a method of realizing a micro SIM card socket and a nano SIM card socket has been proposed, there is difficulty in securing sufficient mounting space in a terminal device. As a result, only one SIM card can be inserted, since a socket space for another SIM card presents the problem of having to allocate an additional space in the device.